ShareGate 2021 Product Roundup

The countdown to 2022 has officially begun! In the inaugural edition of our yearly Product Roundup, we’ll look at what we’ve shipped in your ShareGate apps in 2021.

We’re switching things up in this month’s ChangeLog! The ShareGate Product Marketing team will present a recap of all the updates and changes that were launched in 2021 for ShareGate and ShareGate.

2021 Product Roundup

At the beginning of the year, ShareGate’s Product Director, and Microsoft MVP Benjamin Niaulin, mentioned that with distributed work here to stay, now more than ever, it was essential for us to help IT pros simplify and secure the latest and greatest cloud productivity tool: Microsoft Teams. That’s why we committed ourselves to deliver the best possible Microsoft Teams experience by focusing on:

• Teams migration 
• Teams management 
• Teams security 

And that we did! Let’s look at what our Product team has worked on this year to improve your experience with migrating and managing Teams.

If you didn’t have the time to read all the blog posts, ShareGate Desktop, and ShareGate Apricot release notes we shared, now’s your chance to play catch up.

Teams migration

Microsoft Teams is the most used product in Microsoft 365. So, it was a no-brainer that helping you get your Teams environment just right –without hindering employees’ work– is a priority. We want to guide you to migration and beyond, which means covering as many use cases as possible.

With that in mind, we strengthened our offering by adding the ability to migrate private channels from one team to another and from tenant-to-tenant. That way, all past conversations from standard and private channels as well as files, tabs and other Teams objects are readily accessible at the destination.

We released incremental Teams migrations, also available in PowerShell, allowing you to copy only what’s changed since your last Teams migration. Why’s that important? Simply put, running incremental Teams migration ensures that new conversation and document updates are available at the destination. Employees can continue where they left off without missing a beat!

It also covers any changes made to a team’s Planner plans, because yes, you can easily bring along Planner plans when migrating Teams.

Several teams focused filtering options and reporting are now easily accessible for increased visibility. Whether you’re looking to identify Microsoft 365 groups with an associated team or report on the guests in each of your teams, the Explorer and custom reporting features have you covered!

Reporting and dashboards for increased visibility on teams

It’s no secret that to manage Teams better, you need to know what goes on in it. Ideally, you’d achieve that without the hassle of having to go through multiple admin centers. That’s why many of you love ShareGate’s Manage page, as it gives you the visibility you need on teams and groups in a centralized place, including a list of public and private channels found on each team’s details page. You also find value in using the Activity Log for auditing purposes as it compiles every action you, other IT admins, and owners have taken in your tenant.

Following valuable customer feedback, we released the ability for you to filter and export Manage and Activity Log reports into CSV files. Whether you need to analyze the state of your tenant further, gather teams and groups specific information, or share details with stakeholders, it’s only a click away.

We revamped our Dashboard page, introducing new graphs dedicated to making it easier for you to see:

• How inactive teams have progressed through time
• The status of ongoing external sharing reviews

You’re now better equipped to report on the use of Microsoft Teams and have the necessary data to see whether you need to optimize your different governance policies. Talk about upgrading the organization and security of your tenant!

We know that your day consists of more than managing Teams, which is why we introduced a monthly governance digest. Automatically sent to you via email, the digest gives you a quick overview of what’s been happening in your tenant and highlights the most pressing issues that require your attention. Count on ShareGate to always keep an eye on your environment for you!

Managing permissions in Teams for better security

Securing Teams starts with making sure the right people have access to the right things. It’s easier said than done, that is unless you’ve started using ShareGate’s Teams management features. In the last year, not only have we made it easier for you to add owners directly from our Manage page (because having someone responsible for each team and group is key!), but we’ve also added the Guest access feature to our external sharing policy.

This new addition allows you to review guests in teams and groups, easily revoking those who should no longer have access. Since you don’t always know whether a guest should still have access, you have the option to add the review of guests to an owner’s next external sharing review so that they review both externally shared links and guests. Easy peasy.

We also added the ability to customize the frequency of the reviews based on a team or group’s sensitivity tag. That way, guests in higher-risk teams that contain more sensitive information can be reviewed more frequently. And la crème de la crème? You can now choose to poke owners via email or ShareGate’s chatbot when it comes to the time for a review, putting the importance of permissions at the forefront of your owners’ minds.

Organizing teams with automated governance policies

I think we can all agree that Teams sprawl is headache-inducing. That’s why earlier this year, we added the ability to delete inactive teams or groups individually or in bulk, in addition to the options to keep or archive them. To smoothen the cleanup process, we replaced the entrusting process with a simple and intuitive solution: select the inactive team(s) you want respective owners to review and ask them to act via email or chatbot.

And because no team or group is created equal, we also introduced the ability for you to customize when inactive teams and groups should be cleaned up, based on their purpose. Setting up customized thresholds means that you, or with the help of owners, can clean up short-lived groups more frequently. In turn, you keep your tenant more organized for everybody. We like to call that a win-win scenario!

Coming up in 2022

As we’re preparing for the new year, we’re excited for the new features we’ll be working on for you. Features that contribute to making your experience with Microsoft and its associated apps, whether it’s Teams or SharePoint, increasingly smoother. And that means that the long-awaited provisioning capability will soon be available with ShareGate. Yes! You read it here first! You’ll be able to provision the creation of teams and SharePoint sites using ShareGate. Keep your eyes peeled for more details in 2022!

Product research and feedback

We’re always on the lookout for participants to give us their honest opinions on what we do at ShareGate, in the form of usability tests, surveys, etc. Help us help you better secure and simplify your Microsoft 365 journey.

So, if you have an idea of how we could improve our products, we’d love for you to share it with us in our feedback forums. Our Product team is listening!